In autumn, the landscape in the Berkshires seems to me to be color-coded. As different trees and shrubs take on different hues, I feel when leaf gazing that I’m looking at a diversity map. While the fields and woods appear during the growing season as a monoculture – a veritable sea of greens — the brilliant red of scarlet of pin oaks, the brilliant oranges of sugar maples, the yellows of the American beech, the carmine fans of sumac provide a color-coded map to the range of trees in a given area. Even poison ivy, with its scarlet vines that seem to be burning as much as my skin does when I come into contact with them, calls out from the landscape.
Coincidentally, the Berkshire Botanical Garden is offering its Rooted in Place symposium online this year, focused on ecological landscaping. To me, the timing of this symposium is right. Fall is the perfect moment to assess our gardens from an ecological point of view (and to root out poison ivy.) I was excited to read Margaret Roach’s piece last week in the New York Times about what to leave behind in our gardens to support wildlife over the winter season. In the past, gardeners took to their gardens in the fall the way people traditionally took to spring cleaning their houses — removing everything and sanitizing what is left behind. However, in the past decade, gardeners have come to see their gardens as part of a larger landscape, as a supporting piece of the ecosystem.
This approach has changed our vision of beauty and what should remain behind. Seed heads and grasses are often left standing, so that they can feed the winter birds; leaves are not cleared away, removed or burned, but merely moved off the lawn and into the borders, where, as they break down and add organic matter to our soil, they can insulate our plantings and provide a haven for overwintering insects and wildlife. Even the snags of old trees or pieces of the trunk are left behind, to provide food for insects who in turn become a food source for birds. Over time, these fallen trees support an array of beneficial fungi that slowly break down the wood into its organic components. This season I have taken the advice of renowned organic orchardist Michael Phillips and mulched my fruit trees with radial mulch, broken down duff and bits of hardwood twigs that support beneficial nematodes and insects. This should help to keep my fruit trees healthy.
As this new approach has transformed work in the garden, so too has it changed our perspective on how to use this season as a time of assessment. If we worry less about removing every last leaf, we have time to look at our gardens with the next season in mind. Each year, I try to introduce more natives to my garden, knowing that such plants better support local wildlife. For this reason, I am excited to listen to Rooted in Place speaker Ulrich Lorimer from the Native Plant Trust (formerly the New England Wildflower Society.) Lorimer will talk about an array of natives that belong in my home landscape.
My visit last spring to the Trust’s “Garden in the Woods,” one of my many visits there, already has me excited to add more native azaleas and viburnums, the latter of which produces berries that will help carry some of the local fauna through the winter. As I assess the garden, I am delighted to see squirrels running around, moving acorns about and gathering chestnuts for a nice winter snack. Hopefully, a few of these chestnuts will provide seedlings throughout my garden as, fortunately for me, the squirrels’ memory of where they set things is as bad as my own, as demonstrated by a newly rediscovered pair of pruning shears, now coated in rust.
BBG’s symposium will highlight other gardeners, landscape designers, entomologists, and plant collectors who are rethinking the home landscape, and I look forward to hearing what they have to say as well. And while I am sorry that the pandemic prevents the conference from taking place in person, as such events are also about celebrating our local community, the option of listening to the talks while I am working in my own garden might have me celebrating a different community that warrants some of my attention – the community that inhabits my own garden.
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A gardener grows through observation, experimentation, and learning from the failures, triumphs, and hard work of oneself and others. In this sense, all gardeners are self-taught, while at the same time intrinsically connected to a tradition and a community that finds satisfaction through working the soil and sharing their experiences with one another. This column explores those relationships and how we learn about the world around us from plants and our fellow gardeners.
